July 29, 2006

5:30 p.m. - 6:30 p.m.: Closing Keynote - Creating Your Platform:Chris Nolan leads a discussion with four powerhouse women: Hurricane Katrina Direct Relief founder and professional blogger Grace Davis, Huffington Post founder and author Arianna Huffington, WashingtonPost.com/Newsweek Interactive CEO and Publisher Caroline Little and SixApart founder and President Mena Trott. These women have used the web to create and control their agenda...and give a voice to others. Whether your agenda is transforming your life, your business or the world, this closing session should send you back to your lives (or on to the cocktail party) inspired, energized and ready to make things happen!

Chris: How had blogging changed your life? I thought that since many of you are new to this blogging stuff –thought we’d step away from technology and talk about how their lives have changed since before blogging.

Nolan has been a journalist for 20 years. This is not a conversation that she could have dreamed of having when she started covering politics. How things have changed for women…

Starting with Carolyn – was a lawyer and is now CEO of an entity that probably didn’t exist when she got out of law school. What has changed for you and what is going to change in the future?

Carolyn: I did start a day care center after law school, and I was a junior associate who had been in the office for 30 days. We started a day care center. Started online 10 years ago first as a lawyer and then on the business side, and there weren’t a lot of rules, which was great for her. She looks at this room full of women and sees that this is how it’s changing – never saw this before. It’s wonderful.

Grace: Bay area native, 51 years of changing, that’s a long time. I was born and raised in Fremont California and grew up there before Silicon Valley; it was tract homes and apricot orchards. And I was the writer of the family. “And woe to the family who has a writer.” I went into something other than using my English lit degree which translated to my parents as driving a cab, so I went into biotech. Then in the mid to late 90’s, I was entranced by the Internet and was working for a tech firm that was failing. And discovered web journals and was entranced – and that was what the Internet was all about.

Although I had a scientific background, I was computerphobic and if it wasn’t for Mena Trott and Typepad, I wouldn’t have done it – I have fear of server. What that did for me is that I can write now online and I’m really grateful to mena because technology I really think is for folks and I’m fond of all the geeks and techs out there, but we need to talk and I think that Mena really listened and because of that I’ve been able to write for a living and I’m really grateful for that.

Mena is asked how she sees things changing (she’s younger than the others): I actually see it based upon whether it’s making things easier. Typepad was meant to bring everyone to blogging, but it’s still not easy enough for everyone. Not everyone wants to sit down and spend time writing. The goal for us is to get everyone blogging – they don’t have to be blogging on our platforms, but we want everyone doing it because we’ve seen how it creates communication.

I had a post about a banjo, we didn’t have any money, husband said we couldn’t buy a banjo. I wrote a post calling him out for being the tyrant of the house. Ben is probably the sweetest person at least in his outward persona, and as soon as I put this post up, I got all these emails, asking him how much he spends on beer per year? The second thing people said is why don’t you open your own bank account? The third thing is, why don’t you leave him? And the fact that I had all these people criticizing me, criticizing my marriage, I realized – sometimes blogging isn’t fun.

Over the past couple of years, I realized I don’t really want thousands of people reading my blog – I want ten people who know me really well to read my blog. So I’m giving my only plug, for Vox for the rest of the people who aren’t yet blogging.

Arianna: how to make things that aren’t fun an enjoyable experience?

The political was when Trent Lott was taken on by bloggers and within a few weeks was discredited and had to resign his position and we had to thank the bloggers. And I thought this is awesome – I want to know these people because they’re my heroes. I was so tired of the mainstream media giving a pass to these people.

At the same time, the big love of my life – I had an intellectual crush on him – we had been together for seven years, he did not want to marry me and did not want to have children. So at the age of 30 I made the decision to leave London and move to new york. At about the same time that Trent Lott lost the majority leadership, this man died. We had stayed friends and the minute I heard the news I sobbed and cried and wrote something that was very raw and from my heart and which I thought I would never publish. The next day I got a call from the Times of London and asked me to write something and I did something I had never done – I sent the raw piece, which was unpolished writing.

I was overwhelmed by the response and I realized that people so wanted something authentic and raw because we are so filled with sound bites and preprogrammed and I thought this was amazing – I want to do more of that. And that’s how I decided to become a blogger.

Where do I see it going? I think the sky is the limit. I think this is the most powerful medium since Thomas Payne and the way we women can be the leaders we were meant to be – we need to find the leader in the mirror and act on our leadership skills fearlessly – and it’s the power of blogging.

Carolyn is asked about the power of the blogging medium and writing on the web. Is this a challenge for traditional media companies and businesses?

Carolyn: Yes it is a challenge and either you don’t get there or you get on the boat and we have to get on the boat and we try to report the news and we don’t do it perfectly and there’s a ton of bloggers who will tell us so. Obviously, everyone is covering the terrible situation in Lebanon and Israel and we have a blog with experts weighing in on the situation and readers can comment – and I told my people that we need people who are in Gaza and Golan Heights and tell us what it’s like? What does it feel like to be there? And we did that. Now, we have to be sure to label opinions opinions and reports and have both conservative and liberal bloggers.

Chris: does this medium get more personal or more professional?

Grace: I think it definitely gets both becaue of the license and the incredible freedom we have in using this freedom. In my personal blog, I mix motherhood and advocacy for reproductive rights and then my work for Hurricane Katrina. I think we can be both personal and professional.

Chris: Does it make you nervous to put so much personal information online?

Grace: I think that with this medium it seems to me that an authentic voice is yourself and to identify yourself as who you are. I understand the fears – I’m a mom, my daughter is on MySpace and I understand the fears about MySpace. My blog is extremely personal. People have responded in an amazing way, when I posted about my childhood I received an avalanche of comments.

The Katrina blog came about as a complete accident – we were both accidental relief workers and it did just fall into my life. Katrina was just so overwhelming and the government response was appalling, which pretty much took care of September for me. It was also the month when my daughter started high school.

Chris: What was the worst piece of advice you ever got (not allowed to give the gender of the person who gave it to you)?

Arianna: Most recently, don’t start the Huffington-Post on the grounds of you don’t need to take that risk. And I want to say that on the day we launched we started to get these political reviews and I started to say they were right. I remember Nikki Finke’s review in the LA Weekly. But very simply, it said this is the greatest failure since "Heaven’s Gate," "Gigli," the Madonna of the political world has reinvented herself one time too many. Now she’s blogging… that is simply something that – I think women have a harder time with criticism, we take it personally, how are we going to survive that. You know, we can survive anything if we don’t internalize the criticism because it’s only when we internalize it thast it takes us down.

Carolyn: I was getting all sorts of pressure to hire somebody from print who was very safe and had a lot of credibility in journalism and wasn’t going to cause me any problems. And I didn’t. And I don’t regret it.

I saw Arianna at a panel and I never met you before and I was sitting in the audience and there was some criticism and I was watching you very carefully and there was not one shred of defensiveness and I realized how powerful that was. And that was my big takeaway from that. You practice what you preach.

Chris: Nikki Finke just wrote a column retracting what she said.

Arianna: She said she was wrong.

Mena: I was a chatty kid in school. The advice was, my parents were told Mena needs to focus on herself and not on what the other kids are doing and she needs to stop talking. But like it or not, I am who I am today because I didn’t listen to them and my parents didn’t listen to them. And we were on the cover of Fortune – and my dad emailed the principal of that school to show them. “You always told Mena she wasn’t going to amount to anything.”

Audience: I’d really like to hear more from you about fearlessness. It should apply to all of our identities in a similar way – if I can be fearless as a writer or professional woman, I can be fearless as a mother. But I find motherhood – I’m not remotely fearless. I’m fearful all the time.

Arianna: I completely share your fearfulness in parenting. When I talk about fearlessness, I am talking about not letting our fear stop us. I don’t think we ever get rid of fear, it’s in our DNA. But the trick is not letting it stop us. The hardest fear to overcome is the fear of being a mother. Your fear that your child doesn’t think you’re being a good mother – I can handle Nikki Finke, but if my child doesn’t think – that’s devastating. That’s why I think that there are so many amazing women blogging about mothering – that’s why it’s so powerful. Everything I wrote about my children in my new book I had to have it edited, because I didn’t want them to read or hear anything other than what I was intending.

Talked about meeting Mena and how they met when she wanted to do the website in Movable Type and couldn’t believe her age.

Mena: I won’t always be young.

Grace: That feeds into have I ever received bad advice, because I’m a mom. Fearlessness and being a mom – it takes a great deal of courage to parent – especially to parent a daughter – I think there is so much that works against us, as we know here at BlogHer, we’re here together because many of our professional conclaves are very difficult to women. And all of a sudden I have this Rodgers & Hammerstein song going in my head – make believe you’re brave.

Carolyn: My own mother is very ill but I had the gift of spending some very wonderful time with her. And we were talking about her death – and I told her I was really feeling at peace with our relationship. And she said I know we didn’t get along that well at one point. But you know what, I was just so fearful. And it was just so interesting to hear her say that, but as a kid I heard that as you have no faith in me. So with my children, you have to hold that faith that they will pull through because if you have too much fear for them they won’t grow up with the confidence they need to pull through. And it thought that was very interesting.

Chris: What Carolyn said resonates with the audience and is similar to something in Arianna’s new book

Arianna: Anorexia has become something of an epidemic with teen girls. My mother died in 2000 and she was fearless and she believed – and would give her children whatever it took to give them what she thought they needed. The important thing about mothering, giving our children the sense of unconditional loving, even if they may fail. And having failed many times in my life I realize it doesn’t matter at all.

Audience: I started graduate school late, started a business late. Did it because of fear. Asked panel to share an experience about something they didn’t do because of fear.

Mena: We started Six Apart – just turned 24. And my fear – so wasn’t afraid about the company. We lost our jobs because the company we worked for closed and we had some savings. I think because we started so young, we didn’t realize how much things could fall apart. It’s why teenagers think they’re invincible – they don’t realize and that’s the same thing with us. We didn’t realize that companies are hard, it’s a really stressful thing. Ben and I don’t ever not think about six apart – if we knew that five years ago, I don’t think we would have done it.

Grace: I spent a lot of my life trying to do the right thing and to honor my immigrant parents; people who came to this country and struggled and worked and are not acculturated, their whole reason of being and living is of giving us an opportunity and it sounds trite but it’s very true. I’m a first generation kid trying ot fulfill our parents’ objectives for us and the first thing is safety. And when I became a young adult, one of the things I wrestled with was fear, so I did a lot of things like rock climbing and rapelling and the Transamerica building (story is true but we couldn’t come down because we were arrested).

But writing is the scariest thing I’ve ever done, but I’m telling you that all of you in the community – you’ve supported me, not just in my personal blog – I keep pitching the Hurricane Katrina Relief Blog but I’m very proud of that. I’m a lifelong Democrat, like other folks I know (Arianna laughs) well, not like everyone. But one of the things we have in this country right now is this terrible polarity, and working in Mississippi I realized we’re all just people and it was great to work with these faith based Southern workers and they had this ex-hippie mother from Santa Cruz and we need to work together.

Arianna: My shifting from being a Republican to being a Democrat – that was 10 years ago and that was a long time ago. Dick Cheney was a very good friend at the time and Michael Jackson was still black. But in ’95 I began to realize that this Republican party had a lot to be desired and I also realized that I would lose my friends. I was changing my mind extremely publicly in my syndicated column. I would go to a dinner party and feel like a leper. The big problem was Dick Armey’s wife who came up to me and asked how could you do this to us, when she had been so nice to my kids. But all I could say is that we always have a right to change our minds and evolving occasionally means changing your minds. I think as women we are better at it than men, because they tend to be more rigid. I also believe there’s a place we all need that is not about politics that is deeper than politics.

Audience: About the fear. If it’s important to me and I’m not scared, then I’m really worried, because I like that little fear in the pit of my stomach to move me forward. So I feel really positively motivated when I have that little bit of fear. Question is, people always tell you to make that roadmap and follow that road map and you just follow it. And if you’re not so comfortable with what you’re doing and you want to shift – it’s not just following one thing in a straight path… I feel that there are different personalities, some are better at paths, others at horizontal jumping. I want to hear your experiences to get to where you are – did you always know this is where you wanted to be?

Carolyn: I knew a lot about what I didn’t want to do – like I didn’t want to practice tax law. I feel I made decisions through luck and longing and passion and when I hire people – you want to hire different kinds of people and different kinds of thinkers, which is really important. You need some people who are methodical and others who are all over the map. I think that my career has changed over time – I think women are much more ready to hire someone who is not so abc because most of us have gone in that other direction.

Arianna: Absolutely. I had no idea what I was going to do. I went to Cambridge and studied politics and then completely out of the blue I got an offer from a publisher to write a book. And so I really believe that when I got the call from the publisher, I told him I couldn’t write. And he wrote back and asked if I’d have lunch – and he offered to subsidize me so I could write. And that was my first book, which was published in 26 languages, and I became a writer. I do believe in accidents. And I do believe that when we use our intuition and stay open we can see what the next step is even if we have no idea what the next step is.

Mena: I never had a path. The thing I’ve really followed is this passion, this instinct about what I wanted to do at the time. With Six Apart, I was the CEO because Ben didn’t want to do it and I wanted to do it. And I was 24 – where do you go from there?I was supposed to spend this year working on a press tour for our products. I went from CEO, to the public face – and now I’m a designer, which is right for me, because that’s what I need to do right now. It’s finding that passion, what’s the best for you to do at that time in your life and doing it. Caring about the title and not what you’re doing – it shows.

Grace: I want to acknowledge what Arianna said about intuition – as women we are taught to ignore that part of ourselves. You know what’s right – there’s that other voice that’s nagging – that’s probably your mother, or a nun. It’s probably intuition.

Audience: You talked a little bit about fear and that brings to mind obstacles that get in the way as you’re trying to move through your life and careers. Upon what do you draw your strength? And who are your heroes?

Grace: Obstacles – definitely. Being of color in a predominantly white neighborhood when I was growing up – there were no Indian people, it was a white neighborhood. Issues of self worth and lack of self worth. I had my own obstacles. But the thing that was always fortunate for me was that I always had my pilot light on and it’s there. One of the things that really struck me in this past year and it’s been a big year for me as a blogger is in responding to Katrina, I didn’t even think about the obstacles, I just thought I needed to be there somehow. I may have thought about things differently, like paying attention to liability issues. I just went for it and it was wonderful just to really focus and not look at the obstacles of litigation or that someone might not accept a donation from a bunch of Buddhists from California.

Audience: There are a lot of us who are not married with children and working in an industry that isn’t friendly to that and fear that we may be married to our careers. How have your blogs healed your fears or just one fear?

Carolyn: I’m not answering as a blogger per se – I think you’re right about people without children or significant others. The advantage of having children is that you have to go home. If you’re breastfeeding you have no choice. I worry about the people who don’t have a kid at home, it’s too easy to just work. It’s so important to create those limits. I don’t buy that since I’m a mom I have special needs that you don’t.

Chris: I moderate this panel but I’m not married and I don’t have kids.

Mena: I work with my husband and I worked with him for years before Six Apart. Having this job and having this company has been the best thing for me as a person and a woman. We went to college together, we got married after college, there was a time until a few years ago that I hadn’t been away from him for more than 10 minutes for years. I went to a conference without him and I was horribly scared. Over the past couple of years, I have discovered who we both are as people and have become different people. I find that you just have to figure out what works at that time. I don’t have kids right now, I assume I will, I don’t know. You have to balance something – whether you have kids or not.

Arianna: If I didn’t have children, I think I would have crashed. The thing I find most upsetting about workaholics is sleep deprivation because I think it’s becoming epidemic in our society and it’s especially bad for women because we try to take care of everything so we just sleep a little less. And I just want to start a movement about sleep.

Audience: What can male bloggers do to assist – how can we help you accomplish what you want to accomplish.

Mena: Stop making lists. Like Top 10 bloggers.

Chris: If you’re telling me there aren’t any women bloggers, you’re telling me you don’t read women bloggers. Link. It’s helpful. This is a networked world we live in and if there’s any evidence of that, it’s the people who have come together and the people who are watching it on the web. Because there’s so very much going on here. And you’ve heard from four very different people about how the internet is changing how we live our lives today.

Audience: What I want to know – what really excites you now and what are you doing that’s fearless?

Grace – I’m writing for a living. That is the greatest most wonderful thing I’m doing now,. I’m doing what I wanted to do when I was 10 years old.

Arianna: What most excites me is that we are about to launch a new part of our site in September. Politics Aside – everything that’s NOT politics. Mothering, sex, relationships, cooking, everything. Because however important politics is in our lives, there’s plenty that’s not politics. The editor of politics aside is here. If anyone wants to cross post with us, it’s all about linking and cross posting – it’s all about supporting each other and that’s why on becoming fearless – if anyone wants a free book, just send an email to arianna@huffington-post.com and we’ll send it next week.

Carolyn: I was thinking about this this morning and thinking that I’m really excited about what I’m doing and it’s really true and wondering if this is what happens when you’re in your 40’s. I’m just really excited and it’s good to feel that way.

Mena: The big thing about any product launch is the most exciting thing at the moment. What Vox is for is getting moms – not the moms here, but your moms – bringing blogging to the people who haven’t done it before. Just bring it to regular people, just communicating and writing is a wonderful thing.

3:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.: Is Your Blog a Gallery or a Canvas?: An artist (Elizabeth Perry), photographer (Ms. Jen) and writer (Eden Kennedy) explore art on blogs and blogs as art. Some bloggers are putting their best stuff online...for free. Others are exposing their works in progress. Are blogs a means to an end, or the end itself? And how do you decide what the right approach is for you?

Elizabeth Perry is a sketch blogger: All of my background is in literature and writing and now I’m an accidental tech geek. About a year ago, decided to learn to draw and everyone said you just did it. So I got a sketch book and I wouldn’t care how bad and after 28 days I was so excited that I’d done it for 28 days in a row that I posted a slide show to my blog. And the next day, I did a good drawing and did it again.

577 drawings later, I’m still drawing and posting to my blog. So that’s how I came to be on this panel because I’m interested to see if you see your blog as a space to collect images, artistic works or if you see the whole blog or enterprise as itself a work. So I’m doing an extended performance piece.

Eden Kennedy – fussy.org and yogabeans.com: Part of the reason I’m on this panel is that I’ve put a lot of work into writing a decent blog and if I’d put as much work into a novel or something, I’d have a book. I had a conversation and they said you know, if you pitch a blog book to a publishing company, they won’t get it. So I started questioning the need to be validated in print and thinking maybe this is good enough, so if I keep accumulating the work as a whole, maybe it’s art. And maybe we can define art later if we must. And yogabeans is like a comic book – I take photos of my son’s action figures doing yoga. And I look at the pictures and it looks like they’re saying things to each other. I don’t even know what it is right now.

Jennifer: – I blog at BlackPhoebe/Miss Jen – got my first camera when I was 7 but my mother thought it wasn’t appropriate. Been taking photos for a long time, undergrad in design and art and there was a point in time where I really was engaged in attempting to be a serious artist in terms of paint, gallery – and then the internet came and I fell seriously in love in 1994 and my weblog is an extension of that love. When you get image, text and code together in these little graphic circles, there used to be all these separate worlds and now what we do with these objects in the internet space you’re having the ability – ok convergence, a space in time when we can be wildly creative. Started posting photos immediately and started a photo moblog type of thing and that’s mostly what’s on my site now.

Mrs. K: I’m going to start with a question for both of you, because you both use words and images. What do your images and sketches say that you can’t in words?

Elizabeth: It starts with the image, which is very different when it’s me as a writer. When I’m drawing, it begins with me looking and trying to see better and my day is so full of words and interruptions and excitement and distractions and what I tend to draw are small still life objects from around the house because I do this after everyone has gone to bed and it’s quiet and the writing is a reflection of what the drawing process was and what it meant to me and it’s important to me but it’s an expression that arises out of the drawing.

Jen: Because I really do see it as an intersection, I find that it’s whatever is most interesting me at the time and this year I started thinking – I should out myself to start with – if the definition of this panel is your blog a gallery or a piece of art – I don’t see my blog as a gallery series, I see each post and piece as adding up to a larger whole, a gestalt, so in itself it becomes a piece of work and as a result, if I’m doing something like this if I end up with mostly photos because I’m busy – but at times I don’t take many photos and I end up with a lot of text. I’m trying to figure out how to integrate it better and wondering how do I take this idea of posts so people can see it when they first come and be intrigued by the images but also read the posts.

How many people are artists?

How many people are writers?

Jen: Eden asked us how we feel about images and text. Asked her what the dividing line is

Mrs K: – badnewshughes.blogspot.com – inspired 1000s of bloggers with post about his family’s Christmas. They go and they get drunk and they do funny things and he took bad snapshots of all of it and he wrote captions of everything. And I’ve read it a dozen times. And part of the let’s define art thing – with most blogs, you just want to read the post and go on, but it’s not the kind of writing that you want to return to because it moves you so much. But this rose above the normal blog thing. So you take the camera around and you go to the fair or aquarium and I do a lot of that with the kids – and you can upload it to flickr – but sometimes they just beg to be captioned. And it’s not like I’m a good photographer – if some pictures are worth 1000 words, well, mine are worth about 50 and I need to write the other 950.

Jen: As I said earlier, from 1999 to 2003, I was running a music website. Trying to get up a photo essay in static web pages is so frustrating. I was covering so many events as a music journalist but they were literally a black hole. What really freed me up was getting a content management system in terms of a blog. But I still found that my computer was a black hole for photos. I’m still thinking of photos from 3 or 4 years ago – but having a mobile device, now I can take a photo or set of photos and review them from the gallery of the phone and because I have a data plan, I can send them immediately to flickr or the blog and so now I have the spontaneity of th emoment, it gets up it gets out there. And it frees me from being obsessive about what each image looks like, so I don’t feel the need to polish every photo. This also raises up a question – a lot of times what I try to do is that I will show my friends a picture and ask if they mind and if they don’t want it on the internet, then I won’t.

Audience: Do you every have [ublisher’s remorse?

Jen: I get commenting remorse, because if I’ve had a glass of wine or two (because I do that late at night and that’s when I read blogs). I read Rebecca Blood’s book on blogging in 2003 – once you put something up, you don’t delete it. You may strike through or correct, but you don’t delete it, you take responsibility for it.

Mrs K: that’s like a sketch book rule, you never tear a page out?

Elizabeth: That is my rule. I have a rule that I don’t diss any of my drawings. Because once you start that, there’s no real place to stop. It’s a very easy road to go down. The other amazing thing I discovered is that some of the drawings I really thought were awful, other people respond to and really love. Or I’ll come back to something two months later and I’ll recognize the beginnings of something I’m doing now. Or I can be completely infatuated with a drawing and nothing. No comments.. or I’ll come to it later and say I don’t really know what I was thinking about. I look back to instruct myself but really it’s a way about it being about the process, it’s always the next drawing.

Audience: Do you know who your audience is, and how does that affects the way you make your work? Does that interfere with your process as an artist or is it something that you anticipate, or do you ignore it or is it integral to the work?

Jen: A writer’s process may be different from a sketchbook artist or mobile photography and at what point is revision part of the writer’s trade?

Mrs. K: "To be premature is to be perfect "(Oscar Wilde) – I thought maybe it applied to blogging because in a way it’s better than if you made it perfect because you’re really capturing what’s happening right there in the moment. And even if your drawing was sentimental, that’s where you were. Do you spend much time looking at your archives?

Elizabeth: not really. (Mrs. K holds up her Moleskine notebook – it’s really small) I started with these because they were special and slightly expensive and really cool to work with. But after a while, the paper resisted water, but as I wanted to use color, that was a problem. So now I’m binding my own notebooks (yes I’m that obsessive). It turned out to be easier than I thought it would be.

You were talking about oscar wilde –

(OH MY – there’s a red caterpillar that came up to Jen’s phone and she has to take a picture. This caterpillar is being blogged. (laughter as everyone takes a picture of this caterpillar).

Elizabeth: – it’s undulating. It’s kind of a belly dancer of a caterpillar.

Audience: I don’t know how to compete with a caterpillar, but… Way back when I had an email newsletter, I tried to work with websites, I had a personal website where I was doing a lot of writing and some photography and then I moved over to Blogger. It’s primarily video now but sometimes text and photography, I’m not one thing, when I feel like taking a photo and describing what it means I do that. I interview a lot of artists. If someone would give me instructions on how to videotape art, that would be great. am I a blog? I’ve come to the point of saying I’m me, this is what I do, and so there.

Elizabeth: – I think this is all so new. How these amazing tools are coming together to let us do these things there’s no reason why we can’t reinvent the media. There are amazing communities out there doing all kinds of amazing and new things.

Mrs. K: – that goes back to the audience expectation question, which I don’t think we really answered. Your audience doesn’t know what to expect from you, which sounds really liberating. When you do know your audience, it can be kind of restricting. I got to that point a little while ago, and I decided I’m just going to post lists for a while…sometimes you just don’t want to tell a story. And I know Heather Armstrong approaches her blog like a column. And that’s where the images let you go in a totally different direction and use a different part of your brain and I really love that.

Jen: – pre-Internet, in the art world there was a certain path you would take – move to New York, get involved in the gallery scene, involved in the art market. For writers there is a step process and you start to submit and there’s a set of steps you take. And now that we use this blogging medium – for every one person who gets a book published or a solo show at a gallery, there are thousands of other people who are working quietly at home and are just as good. So the question I have for us – now that we have blogging and the Internet – and for the last 10 years – am I running my own gallery of which I’m self publishing, and is that something now I should be pursuing in order to monetize (buzz word of the day) – how do we engage in this thing especially if this is your love and your passion and you want this to be your career? Where is that tension for you? Do you put certain things on your blog but not others because you’re reserving those for your publisher?

Elizabeth: I think I have photos like that, but my drawing project is such a different thing for me. There aren’t a lot of drawings besides the ones in the sketch books. I don’t always post all of them but I don’t hold back things that are special. But if I write a piece of fiction, I don’t post on my blog but send to an editor with a query letter.

Mrs K: – I put everything I’ve got into my blog because it makes me feel that I can write about anything. Even if it’s just three paragraphs. If I was reserving things for my novel, then the blog wouldn’t be quite as good and who knows what the novel would end up like.

Elizabeth: – you were able to start a second blog. Not like the yogabeans had to go on fussy or that fussy wasn’t honest. There might be another kind of writing that would be different so maybe if you were stretching out into a longer fiction or nonfiction it might be a different kind of writing for you.

Mrs K: – I used to think there was a novel in me, but lately I think – I don’t. I might have a little gift book or some weird yoga thing. It’s kind of sad. Well, not sad. Because I think blogging is really wonderful…

Elizabeth: – you might have a fully choreographed ballet you don’t know about. If you had asked me when I was 20 and applying for MFA fiction writing school that I would be an artist, I would have said I don’t think so.

"A small daily task if it be truly daily will outpace the labors of the most spasmodic Hercules" (Trollope quote)

That tiny thing adding up is interesting.

Audience: We all might have a symphony inside of us – been building websites and working for myself for almost 10 years and the greatest thing I’ve learned is that not every idea I have is one I want to spend time on.

Audience: What we’re all saying is that we do find out who we are through our blogs because when I started my blog I thought I was starting a writer’s website because I’m a writer but what I found out is that I care about visual art, movies, music – but I’m not part of the lit blog community because while I’m a writer I don’t want to write about who got a book deal. The blog itself is a gallery – or a salon, really. I think I’m channeling Gertrude Stein – I would like to see more dialogue with the artists. Not quite there with the dialogue.

Jen: I flew from Dublin, Ireland on Wednesday and not on right time zone so forgive me. I want to ask the audience: how do you find yourselves working with themes in your work? If you go to any writing workshop they tell you to work through your themes, also true of photography. I read my blog once a year on its blog birthday and by doing that, I see that my photos are falling into some categories and it really allows me to see what my themes are.

Audience: I definitely – I write about going to college and being on my own and I definitely discovered a theme is family and the huge schism between my life and my hometown and moving to college and that drivintg that 250 miles is like driving to another world and my family doesn’t understand what that huge dichotomy is, but my college friends do get it.

Audience: do you guys make a distinction between art and craft as far as delineating and defining things?

Jen: How many people here read A Wrinkle in Time? (most of the hands go up) Madeline L'Engle has another book called Walking on Water that addresses creativity, that creativity makes us human and when we are creative we are participating in a process that makes us more human than we were before. When I went to art school there was a barrier between fine art and design – yet now these barriers are crashing. And then you look at some of the crafting sites and people are making these incredibly beautiful things. At what point – maybe it’s not between craft and art but public and personal.

Introduced Megan McMullen – an artist and writer from Texas who is part of a team that does video installations. Did a residency in Spain this year. One of the women was from the Midwest and takes photos of graffiti and she went around Barcelona and then she would stitch embroidery of the graffiti – it’s whimsical and adds layers of meaning and yes, it’s craft but it’s art and I’m not going to make the delineation.

Elizabeth: – My mother went to art school in the late 50’s, working with traditional women’s work. Her mother knit, I learned how to knit – she went with the idea that text and textile have the same origin and English is full of words that connect. She took her mother’s journal, cut it up and knit it into a garment after my grandmother had died. It’s profound when you begin to blur these boundaries because some of these boundaries are rooted in political and class and other kinds of divisions between what is art, high art, or just a project? I know it’s a contentious or painful issues for some people that art sites on blogger unless you’re in entertainment, come under hobbies and some people fine that difficult because it’s more serious to them and hobby sounds dismissive but it’s not your day job either. So where’s the category for that kind of personal expression.

I like the maker to decide how to present that to the audience.

Audience: I expected to come here and see pictures as well. As an artist, there is something about the tactile quality of your work that I cannot see on the web. The other thing – what is more important, the visual or the word? If I had a blog site I would just have pictures and there is a purity in that. I’d like your comment on that.

Mrs. K: – I wouldn’t dare tell people what’s more important because some people have a knack for one and not the other. But I do know the tactile quality of words as they relate to blogs – the one blog that has been published as a book – I got a copy and I’m reading it and I thought it’s great to have on my lap, but I’ve already read it. For me, a book that’s very tactile needs to have more weight and threads and themes and stuff and development and character. She’s a wonderful writer – but the book itself was a very odd experience.

Elizabeth: – would you have felt differently if it had been syndicated in a newspaper instead and you were still getting it a little bit at a time?

Mrs. K: – yes.

Jen: – I think also, for me, there’s not that big of a differentiation. It’s a different act. Painting, photos, typing – different acts. Different movements, like dancing or reciting poetry is different from reading poetry,. Somebody like Nam June Paik – in his video pieces, he always made sure there were objects so people could go into the spaces and have an object anchor them. It’s still art. I personally don’t need it to be in person or to be an actual object.

Elizabeth: – for me, it’s both. I don’t see the blog as a gallery so it’s not a place where I’m showing work that exists elsewhere. I’m interested in the relationship between this private object which I then put out in this public space of the Internet and it’s reflected on a screen where light is shooting into your eyes but it’s largely experienced in private. People tend to look at their computer screens by themselves. It’s mostly a private experience, so I’m kind of interested in that, and the accumulation over time of these small moments. If the primary existence of the work for you is in the physical space and that’s where the delight is, then the web is a pale imitation.

We were told no projectors on day 2 so we wouldn’t rely on Powerpoint, they wanted it to be more conversational.

Audience: there’s a tendency to want to own a piece of your work by fans – you want to have a more direct interaction. Have you thought of providing something like that for your audience - not necessarily a book, but some kind of takeaway?

Jen: I put my photos and create a rubric of photos and that’s what we’d pass out to people and bands loved it especially if they were on that postcard and then they would put it out on their tour merch tables for free and that was how the work would get out. I’ve watched some of the chap books Heather Champ has made and thought maybe I should.

Mrs. K: – I actually sell t-shirts off my site. I have found out how difficult it is to create t-shirts.

Elizabeth: – I have a business card – homemade – haven’t figured out what I’m doing with that. I can’t see cutting up the sketch books and part of the nature of the project is the bookness of them. I’ve thought of doing a chapbook – I’ve thought of doing a separate series of drawings that wouldn’t be the daily drawings but would be for sale, but haven’t figured out what to do with that. Have another project in mind – am interested in museums and collections. I think I’m going to do the daily drawings of my own life but also to draw my way through the museum collections. Might be the water fountains or somebody’s shoes. That’s a project that I see balancing in dialogue with my own daily drawings next year. But after that, I’ve thought about doing something that could sell. The word monetize doesn’t sound right to me – guess I’m prejudiced about ugly sounding words.

Jen: More of my shuddering is about all these buzzwords wandering around the web and at what point do we play into them, if you care about a word and how it’s used? I’m not afraid to say yes and it would be good to make money off my creations, but there are so many ways – sometimes things are appropriated in the wrong way.

Audience: With all the different kinds of social capabilities through blogs and other technologies – what are your thoughts on collective creativity – has anyone in the room participated in these?

Elizabeth: – There are collective sites. I live in Pittsburgh – an old city, a great city for artists because it is affordable. There are all these wonderful old buildings and old businesses that have some of these wonderful old signs and I’m one of the editors of the Pittsburgh signs project, and there are about 60 photographers involved and there are about 300 photos on the site. People also participate by commenting. There’s also a flickr group around. The flickr photographers in town do things together and tag them – as these things are evolving, people are figuring out new ways to use them.

Audience: There’s a lot more of that really happening and I’m sure in the other forms of art as well.

Audience (Jenny of ThreeKidCircus): with collaborative projects – my brain tends to work towards, how can I make money off of this. As an artist, does that cheapen what you’re trying to do? Because I do think there’s tremendous potential to make money off these fantastic art projects. Does it cheapen the art or make it less valuable?

Mrs K: – there’s nothing wrong with that.

Jen: – That brings me back to the question too – you’ve stated on your website that you’re a writer and you’re a mom. So is this a way for you that you are approaching maybe a new way to publish, rather than submit to a publisher?

Jenny: Absolutely – my whole goal in life is to find a way to be paid for being me.

Jen: that’s a fabulous goal!

Jenny: With the blog – I’m really the stereotypical mom who talks about the pee and the poop but I really feel like the best is yet to come for me, so I’m training for that. The feedback is so valuable that it makes you a better writer.

Mrs K: – I had a great commenter – the WGA says that only 3.7% of writers are making a living at it in the US. And as a musician, she had far more satisfaction just performing out in the street and putting out a hat. And that’s why we blog.

Audience: more on collaborative projects, by blog.

MISSED THE REST OF THIS – INTERNET ISSUES

Jen :– I know we stated our opinion here and jenny stated hers. Does anyone else have any other ideas on blog a gallery or a canvas?

Audience: – I think I’ve got both. Sometimes you’re using the blogging software just to put something up there.